Happy new year to you all! The start of a new year is often a time for making resolutions (personal goals include running more than twice a week, reigning in my love of office snacking, and shouting less at other road users….although I don’t want to push it!!) and deciding that we are going to alleviate some of the stress in life.

And, of course, taking time out from work is one of the ways we do this. Yes, a quick straw poll has confirmed my suspicion that people are starting to think about holidays in sunnier climes now that the Christmas trees have been packed away for another year.

Luckily, it is administratively a piece of cake to both apply for, and approve/reject, annual leave at Oval since we built our leave management apps in Podio (us Brits call it annual leave....but you might call it holiday/vacation/something else to describe days off work).

I won’t dwell on the clunkiness of the way we used to do things (it’s a new year remember! We are only looking onwards and upwards!), but suffice to say that the way we do things now is much more streamlined. Here’s an overview to give you an idea of how it works.

We created two apps which work together to tie all our data together: Leave Allocations and Leave Requests.

LEAVE ALLOCATIONS

LEAVE REQUESTS

Using a selection of relationship and calculation fields, we are able to ‘feed’ data back and forth between the two apps – this means that, as a team member, you can quickly and easily see how much leave you have remaining for the year, and which dates you have already booked. From an HR point of view, you are able to immediately see which staff members are on leave, and when, as well as receiving tasks to remind you when a request needs to be reviewed.

The original upload of allocation data was performed by importing an Excel file which contained all relevant information for each of our team members; as people join or leave the company, individual records can be added or removed.

Of course, what we have put together suits our needs here at Oval; there may be other elements that are pertinent to your own organisation, and how the leave allocation/application process is handled there – what we have set out here is by no means set in stone!

If there is something we haven’t covered here that you’d like some advice on, then give us a shout and we’d be happy to help. Assuming we’re not all on holiday, obviously……